"He dreams of the day when the spell of the bestseller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered." Enrique Vila-Matas

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Unicuique suum

To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia

I have never been fond of
thrillers, which tend to make me feel like a puppet on strings. The artifice,
the manipulation, is too much for me, too conspicuous, too plain; it is often
all (what little) I see. What makes reading such popular fiction so difficult for
me, so unsatisfactory, so discouraging finally, is that, much like video, it is
generally constructed in such a way as to merely tell you—rather than show you—a
tale. By its nature, it asks very little of you, the reader, but that you be
passive and receive. It imposes
rather than supposes.

A literary agent who
specializes in ‘literary fiction’ recently replied to a query of mine (I’d sent
her the opening pages of a novel I’d written) by chiding me, “I hope you’re not
one of those writers who think that plot is secondary.” It was everything I
could do not to respond, “No, I am not one of thosewriters. To me, plot isn’t even a tertiary concern.” It would not have been an exaggeration. F. Scott
Fitzgerald famously wrote, “Character is plot, plot is character.” It is what I
too believe, that literature is first and foremost the study of character, of
what it means to be human, of what it is (may it never be discovered) that
makes us tick. Reading literary fiction is nothing if not the expression of a deep-seeded
desire to know others, to be less lonely, to see ourselves more truly. It is
about confronting—again and again—what Neruda calls “the confused impurity of
the human condition.”

Yet there is more to literary
fiction than that. Now more than ever, it is also, and essentially, about
empowerment and agency in an increasingly coercive, increasingly anti-democratic world, a blooming
corporate sovereignty that depends more on servility and conformity and
consumption than on freedom and dignity, on courage and struggle and change. The
sort of fiction I live to read (the sort of fiction TR founder George Ovitt and
I have extolled for years on this blog—see again his post on The Grapes of Wrath) is that which not
only invites me to participate in it, in the active construction of its meaning,
its value, but actually requires it, indeed
is incomplete, impossible, without me, without my intelligence, my commitment,
however uncertain and imperfect they may be. Reading literary fiction is one of
the great, time-tested ways of training the heart and mind to participate
wholly, urgently, in the world about us, to question and resist, to engage bravely
and meaningfully with others. Great fiction doesn’t simplify life but complicates it. It must—or it deceives.

All of which is to say
what? All of which is to say how strangely pleasant it was to read Sicilian
author Leonardo Sciascia’s perhaps best known detective thriller, To Each His Own. It surprised me at
every turn—its lack of gimmickry, its depth of character, and its language
itself, not to mention its brooding, ultimately fatalistic critique of the codes
and culture of Sicily, the author’s own home and hell. Philip Hensher puts it
best: “Some of [Sciascia’s] books, like the brilliant To Each His Own, look like bleak, inclusive thrillers, and slowly
turn into grand indictments of the abuse of power. They are all very different
books, united by a ruthless, unsparing gaze, and common subject in power and
its abuses.”

George Ovitt and Peter Adam Nash

George Ovitt is the author of The Restoration of Perfection; The Snow Man, a collection of short stories, and Splitting the Difference, a collection of poems.
Peter Nash is the author of a recently completed novel called Parsimony, as well as of a biography on the life and times of the turn-of-the-century Jewish American sculptor, Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel. He can be reached at nashpeter@mac.com.